Stratos: A Network-Aware Orchestration Layer for Virtual Middleboxes in Clouds

TL;DR

Stratos is a network-aware orchestration layer designed to improve the management, scaling, and provisioning of virtual middleboxes in cloud environments, addressing challenges of dynamics and multiplexing.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic orchestration framework that enables efficient composition and provisioning of virtual middleboxes with dynamic scaling capabilities in clouds.

Findings

Effective composition and scaling demonstrated in prototype and simulations.

Improved resource utilization and performance in cloud middlebox deployments.

Scalable provisioning strategies that adapt to network dynamics.

Abstract

Enterprises want their in-cloud services to leverage the performance and security benefits that middleboxes offer in traditional deployments. Such virtualized deployments create new opportunities (e.g., flexible scaling) as well as new challenges (e.g., dynamics, multiplexing) for middlebox management tasks such as service composition and provisioning. Unfortunately, enterprises lack systematic tools to efficiently compose and provision in-the-cloud middleboxes and thus fall short of achieving the benefits that cloud-based deployments can offer. To this end, we present the design and implementation of Stratos, an orchestration layer for virtual middleboxes. Stratos provides efficient and correct composition in the presence of dynamic scaling via software-defined networking mechanisms. It ensures efficient and scalable provisioning by combining middlebox-specific traffic engineering, placement, and horizontal scaling strategies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Stratos using an experimental prototype testbed and large-scale simulations.